We would like to welcome Amy Bowser, who comes to SAGE bringing her expertise and many, many years of experience in litigation support. With over 100 electronic discovery cases under her belt, Amy has worked in large national law firms and as a consultant serving corporations, and small and medium law firms as well. She has managed large, complex litigations, “Second Requests” and electronic discovery productions to the SEC, DOJ, FTC, and USITC.

Amy frequently speaks at law technology conferences throughout the US and is very active in the Washington, DC litigation support community. As the Director of the DC Chapter of Women in eDiscovery, Amy leads and supports the growing community of businesswomen in the legal technology arena.

Please join us in welcoming Amy to the SAGE team, where she brings her singular skills to an elite corps of IT engineers, consultants, and customer support specialists.

Growth happens, sometimes in spite of all our actions! Many small firms rely on individual IT consultants or large IT companies specializing in small firms. So what are the signs you are outgrowing your current IT provider? We list the indicators below, focusing on moving from one person IT consultants to larger IT consulting firms with a broader array of services. In a future post we will discuss the decision to bring IT in-house.

One obvious indicator is that they can’t keep up with your demands for services and support. Your growth places increasing demands on them that they may not be able to meet. In the case of large IT companies catering to small firms, you may simply outgrow their targeted services. A growing firm’s technology also becomes more sophisticated, broader, and more specialized all at the same time. A wider array of services in litigation support, message, VOIP, DMS, web sites, and enterprise level applications are required. At the same time, law firms have very focused software applications that require careful setup and support. Larger IT firms with engineers, application specialists, and programmers can provide the breadth and depth of expertise to meet these demands.

Finally, a surefire giveaway that it is time to move on is if you as a firm manager or administrator are leading your IT firm or bringing trends to their attention. If so, time to start looking for a partner knowledgeable in the latest trends in IT like mobile computing, virtualization, online services and others.

This blog post over at 37 Signals about the preoccupation with the number of features in software development made us think of the flip side: the allure of a multitude of features in purchasing software for a firm. Rather than focusing on benefits to the users, we are guilty of tallying up the features added since the last release. Other pitfalls include:

Different features appeal to different constituencies. When looking at putting software on everyone’s desk or expensive enterprise applications, justifying the large expenditure means getting majorities on management committees to sign off. So we play to our audience, touting different features to different principals to get them to sign-off on the purchase.

Even incredibly smart people fall for the “more is better” argument. Quantity is viewed as value when the price is similar. That value is completely lost if the software becomes too complex or confusing to use. Microsoft’s latest release of Office is notable for its rethinking of the interface after market testing found that users were requesting “new features” that were already in the software but hidden behind menus.

The devil is in the details. Next to lawyers and politicians, sales people are great parsers—saying less to portray the product as delivering much more. Once in users hands, features that looked great on the spec sheet and the tightly scripted demo do not work as promised or their benefits are not as great as expected.

The end result is usually confusion and never-ending calls to the help desk. As consultants, administrators and IT managers, we have to manage the purchasing decision much better. We must frame the purchasing discussion around critical features, not an accounting of a myriad nice-to-have ones. Software purchasing decisions should focus on benefits to the firm rather than appealing to building coalitions through feature-“pork.”